Hania Rani scoring for "Sentimental Value"

For Hania Rani composing for the most recent film by Joachim Trier was nothing less than a true joy and a real artistic adventure. As she explains: “It doesn’t happen often that I’m asked to work on a film by a director whose work I know so well and which resonates with me so naturally. What I understood while working with such an intriguing mind and intelligent artist as Joachim is that the role of a film composer is to wander along with the director, hand in hand, rather than follow one another. The collaboration should be a partnership - evenly balanced and able to invigorate people on both ends - otherwise it will always feel superficial, imposed, and timid”

Intriguingly Hania worked on the score for Sentimental Value without an edit in hand; instead, she was given a carefully written script and the freedom of her own substantial imagination. “This way of composing suits me perfectly, as I’m not the type of composer who works comfortably with particular scenes, slightly immune to functionality in music in general. I prefer to ponder sound in separation from the image. It enables me to fabricate more abstract sequences that are not yet expressed in the film and to bring a new context to the existing narrative. Music as an inherent counterpoint - this sounds more intriguing to me”.

For Hania the biggest challenge of the score was its gravity - or rather its visibly elusive nature. The story told in the film oscillates around three characters and the motionless presence of the house, yet the relationships between all these personalities are not fixed, but in progress. Those subtle qualities were at the center of her attention and became the core topic of numerous discussions with Joachim about the music, the film, and the philosophy behind Sentimental Value. “I wondered how to express such translucent virtues in this score; that’s why a great deal of the process was embedded in exercises of mediation and translation. In order to avoid directness, I decided to impure the sound with a succession of small sonic gestures - whether re-arranging, reorchestrating, revisiting, stretching the duration, or simply recording in a new acoustic environment. The mediated sound and expression allowed me to model a soundscape that inhabits both the old and the new, much like the house, which holds within itself the past, present, and future”.

In September 2024, Hania went to Oslo and spent a couple of days in the main film (the family home in Oslo) with her sound engineer, Agata Dankowska. The film crew was away in France to shoot another scene for the project, so they were allowed to freely explore the space - both visually and sonically. They made field recordings in the building, capturing the sounds of objects and furniture found in the apartment, and they also managed to record a couple of piano pieces. The house plays a significant role in the story, silently witnessing the tangled trajectories of its residents. “To explore its interiors so closely inevitably reminded me of getting to know a real person, with all their vulnerable parts and secrets. And although most of the recordings were not supposed to become part of the final soundtrack, I felt that this visit gave me access to another, far more intimate layer of the film, which immensely informed my composing process afterwards and reshaped my relationship with the project. There was a real sense of immediacy that felt exciting, instinctive, and simply incredibly special”.